I Like My Women Cheap

They say that prostitutes make the most money on the first and fifteenth of every month. On those days, the automobile workers get paid and people receive government cheques. Among the flotsam and jetsam of people who are homeless, or who look like they are homeless, are the people that the whores know are supposed to get cheques.

You can run into a prostitute anywhere: in or outside a bar, at a diner or truck stop, on a street corner or bus depot, or even in a parking lot. You can go to them at the massage parlours, like the ones on Wyandot East, if you like, or you can let them come to you.

I have seen skinny, wraith-like black women in Detroit with blond wigs, ten-inch heels, and short skirts that looked old enough to be grannies, but most of the ones that have accosted me looked ordinary, neither sexy nor particularly whorish in appearance. They could have fit in anywhere: at the supermarket or at a Zeller's, at a corner bar or at a picnic. None of them were beautiful, and almost none of them were even remotely attractive to me.

November is perhaps the worst month of the year, if you live out on the street in a city of the northern temperate zone. The trunks of the bare trees all look more grey than brown. Though you may get a sudden but brief Indian Summer, it's also grey and windy that month, and you can get rain, sleet, or snow, sometimes all on the same day. As well, people have to change their clocks back, because usually it's the end of daylight savings time that month. Therefore, there's that extra hour of darkness, that extra hour of gloom. Winter always comes before people are ready for it.

I met her in a parking lot on the first, or fifteenth of November, somewhere on Huron Church Road. I guess I looked to her like someone who had just received a cheque, either a pay cheque from one of the automotive companies, or a government cheque like a social insurance cheque.

She was no more than five feet, four inches tall, with a squared body. Though she looked young enough to be my daughter, she was probably at least seven or eight years older than my daughter, around twenty-five years old, with blond hair and blue eyes, and cheeks stung red by the cold wind whipping in from Lake St. Clair to the north. You could say she had a healthy glow, like a farm girl from Saskatchewan, since her cheeks were red and she was young. She didn't have the tubercular look that you read about in nineteenth-century fiction, where skinny maidens with tuberculosis and bright red cheeks have to sell themselves to survive.

Maybe she could have been a student at the University of Windsor, since the parking lot was near the campus, but she wasn't a student, I'm sure.

"Do you want a date?" she asked, somewhat self-consciously, I thought.

Of course, I knew that she wasn't asking me if I wanted to take her to the movies, but I said yes anyway, and she told me where to go. I drove her to a cheap motel along the water front, near Sandwich. At the time, the Windsor Casino hadn't been built yet, and there was still a Holiday Inn down by the river.

The entire time that she was in my car, she never looked at me once. It was like she didn't want to acknowledge my existence any more than she had to. She merely gave me directions to the motel in short, clipped phrases.

When I asked for her name, I expected her to say something like Candy or Brandy, like one of the dancers with the Windsor Ballet— what I call a nom de la nuit. I would have laughed my ass off if she had given me the name of my ex-wife— the whore!— but she told me that her name was Karen.

I parked away from the motel on a side street, in case the police were watching the place. That way, if the place was raided, my car wouldn't be impounded, even if I was arrested. Once I was in a hotel room with her, she gave me the price of a blow job (which was something like ten dollars), and the price of actually fucking her: about twenty or twenty five dollars. For about thirty dollars, I got both.

After the blow job, Karen turned around, pulled her pants and her underpants down, and I took her from behind. The whole thing lasted maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, about the time it took for me write this paragraph. I doubt that I took her to the heights of ecstasy.

Of course, I used a condom— you never know what you might catch from a woman of the night.

After I was done, we settled up. During the transaction, when I paid my thirty dollars, Karen never made eye contact one time. Maybe I could have made her eyes light up by tipping her with a hundred-dollar bill, but this was a low-budget encounter. I didn't have a hundred dollars on me. Besides, if she had a pimp, he would have wanted all of her money, including the hundred, anyway. Pimps are like that, you know.

For some reason, I thought of asking her why she did it, but I didn't want to come across like a missionary in some place like Papua New Guinea, who had forgotten that the original idea was to save souls rather than succumb to the natives. I didn't want to sound like a hypocrite, or make her think that I somehow disapproved. Besides, I'm sure she had been asked that before.

After the encounter, I drove home to my place in Ford City, near the Ford plant, one of those two-storey bungalows built during the Dirty Thirties of what were probably the cheapest materials available at the time. I opened a Molson Canadian, sat down in front of the television, and watched the Red Wings. I didn't want to think about it, but I thought about it during the hockey game.

I felt different, like I had the first time I had had sex. I still don't know why I did it, except that maybe she was just available, and I had a little extra money.

The fact that you have paid for sex isn't something that you want to admit to just anyone. Oh, sure, people will tell you that you pay more in the long run, if you are married or in a long-term relationship, but an anonymous encounter with a prostitute isn't something that you write home about. Your mother isn't going to want to meet the prostitute.

But sometimes, we just like our women cheap.